It doesn’t take a Harvard degree to figure out that men and women think differently.

And if you live and work on the farm, it only magnifies that notion.

Volumes could fill presidential libraries on the ways farmers and their spouses can think and do things differently from each other to accomplish the same things.

It happens all year long if you hang out together very often, but I felt it creeping up on me this year again as spring field work elbowed its way into the calendar.

As April became imminent, my husband dragged the tractor and roller out of the shed for its annual checkup. It so happened that while he was working on the roller, I was cleaning out the tractor and scouring out any evidence that could implicate a possible family of ferrets that may or may not have been overwintering in there.

That clean-up work involved some sewing. Mending has dogged me as a woman of the farm, but now my repair work had morphed into moving outside. I had to fix a hole in the tractor seat, created by a rodent that chewed a hole in the cloth seat covering — all while completely disregarding how we would feel about him/her having completed that task.

At least this hole could be fixed, as compared to the hole I made in the vinyl tractor seat of Dad’s new Oliver 1750 when I was a kid experimenting with the cigarette lighter, which apparently intrigued me greatly. (What better place to try it out, right?)

I brought out all the sewing things — thread that matched, a heavy needle, scissors and a thimble — so I would not only look like my grandmother, but ensure that I would not bleed out through my fingertips, given the task ahead. My husband would be too busy to come to my aid if I poked into an artery.

It’s interesting how men and women think about this type of sewing job. My husband said if he was doing it, he would have used the operating room instruments available to him when he’s out fixing rear-end misfortunes in the lambing barn.

I’m glad he didn’t. I have to sit on that tractor seat, too.

A job that we thought would be a fairly simple fix ended up taking both of us to repair — one to hold the fabric together with just the right fold-overs, and the other to do the sewing.

I won’t tell you which of us was doing the instructing, and who was doing the cussing.

Soon we moved on to the next job — checking the obedience of the roller.

“Pull the lever back,” my husband shouted over the running tractor.

I pulled it back, and it did nothing.

Puzzled, we made sure I had pulled the correct lever back, and still nothing. Then it occurred to me.

“Do you mean to push it ahead?”

He waved an “OK.” (I think with a full accounting of fingers involved) and all worked as expected. (Well, maybe as not expected, since equipment that works fine and gets put away when we’re finished using it somehow finds a way to be barely operable the following year when we need to use it again.)

My husband’s version of pulling a lever back was my version of pulling it ahead. I had pushed it the opposite way than he wanted and derailed the process; but, as always, simple communication can set the train back up on the tracks again.

It’s the same when handling plywood, building tin, etc., and it needs to be “turned end for end.” That can be done a couple of different ways depending on the project. If I try to outguess, I am almost always unsuccessful.

Clearly, Batman had better odds of figuring out “The Riddler” than I would have had.

Most days, we just don’t speak the same language — even after 40 years.

Karen Schwaller writes from her grain and livestock farm near Milford. She can be reached at kjschwaller@outlook.com